I talked recently with Alex Debelov, founder at Virool, Y Combinator graduate and record breaking seed round funding CEO about competitive advantage. “While my competitors are eating, sleeping, having sex and going to the movies – I’m working on my product. That’s my competitive advantage.” It makes a lot of sense if you look at the numbers.

If you add 1% more time to your productivity every day, you’d have 87.6 more hours to focus on product. That’s over two work weeks. If you minus 1% of productivity each day, you’re losing over two weeks of productive hours. If you minus 2% each day, you’ve lost a month of productivity.

Labeled for reuse. Courtsey of YouTube.com

How much time are you spending daily or weekly on things that don’t move your product forward? If your competition is spending more time on their product, they’ll probably win the race.

If you’ve decided to spend the next few years of your life on a startup, you’ll need every advantage you can get to beat your competition. Whoever is most focused on the goal has a better chance of winning.

Training Yourself To Have An Advantage Over The Competition

Use this productivity training template to start developing habits around more productivity. Let’s say startup period is 3 years. That’s 156 weeks. Printout of your weekly life calendar onto a piece of paper and look at each day as you move through the week.

In each cell that you feel like you succeeded in focusing on your startup leave it blank. If you feel like you were distracted at all, mark an X in the cell. From here you can calculate how much time you’re losing on productivity.

If you focus 1% more every day, you get weeks of increased productivity per year. If you spend another 1% per day on a relationship, you lose that amount in productivity or competitive advantage.

This is the logic behind focusing on your startup.

It’s about having the right mindset. The most successful startups develop the right amount of habits for a season, while they are growing their startup. If you are spending time thinking about dating and relationships you’re distracted. The human brain can think about only 1 thing at a time. You want your startup hyper focused and nothing else.
Your startup is competing with 100 other people doing the same thing. If they’re focused more 1% every day, they win.

Pavel Cherkashin

I find good ideas and people in internet and technology and help them grow into $100m companies that make customers, employees and investors happy.
Sometimes I do this myself, somethings I help other people do this better than me.
I serve as Director at GVA Capital – early-stage VC firm, helping great startups successfully go global.